NOTE: This American Life has retracted this story because we learned that many of Mike Daisey's experiences in China were fabricated. We have removed the audio from our site, and have left this transcript up only for reference. We produced an entire new episode about the retraction, featuring Marketplace reporter Rob Schmitz, who interviewed Mike’s translator Cathy and discovered discrepancies between her account and Mike’s, and New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg, who has reported extensively on Apple. Ira also re-interviewed Mike Daisey to learn why he misled us.

Mike Daisey performs an excerpt that was adapted for radio from his one-man show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs." A lifelong Apple superfan, Daisey sees some photos online from the inside of a factory that makes
iPhones, starts to wonder about the people working there, and flies to China to meet them. His show restarts a run at New York's Public Theater later this month.
(39 minutes)
Business • Labor • Politics • Technology

What should we make of what Mike Daisey saw in China? Our staff did weeks of fact checking to corroborate Daisey's findings. Ira talks with Ian Spaulding, founder and managing director of INFACT Global Partners, which
goes into Chinese factories and helps them meet social responsibility
standards set by Western companies (Apple's Supplier Responsibility page is here), and with Nicholas Kristof, columnist for
The New York Times who has reported in Asian factories. In the podcast and
streaming versions of the program he also speaks with Debby Chan Sze Wan, a
project manager at the advocacy group SACOM, Students and Scholars Against
Corporate Misbehavior, based in Hong Kong. They've put out three reports
investigating conditions at Foxconn (October 2010, May 2011, Sept 2011).
Each report surveyed over 100 Foxconn workers, and they even had a
researcher go undercover and take a job at the Shenzhen plant. (15 minutes)Criminal Justice • Labor • Politics • Technology

NOTE: This American Life has retracted the above story because we learned that many of Mike Daisey's experiences in China were fabricated. We have removed the audio from our site, and have left this transcript up only for reference. We produced an entire new episode about the retraction, featuring Marketplace reporter Rob Schmitz, who interviewed Mike’s translator Cathy and discovered discrepancies between her account and Mike’s, and New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg, who has reported extensively on Apple. Ira also re-interviewed Mike Daisey to learn why he misled us.

Photo

Workers at an electronics factory in Shenzhen, China. Courtesy of Mike Daisey.